GREEN WARS: Environmentalism as a National Security Issue

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2000 by Paul Benjamin

"... Some U.S. agencies are acting as if all environmental harm, anywhere in the world, requires strong American action, and are forgetting the risks and moral issues involved."

IN 2015, the U.S. invades Brazil to put an end to logging in the rain forests. In 2020, war breaks out in western Africa as people vie for arable land in the face of a rapidly encroaching desert, and the U.S. and its NATO allies intervene to prevent a wider conflict. By 2022, the U.S. military is running domestic and overseas poverty reduction and population control schemes and dominates a global environmental surveillance network. Implausible? Not necessarily, if current trends in American security policy continue unabated.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, policymakers have struggled to redefine the security interests of the U.S. With the overriding threat of the previous half-century no longer in existence, America has had to take a new look at where threats to its security may occur and how best to deal with them.

The result has been a conscious shill from a limited, largely military sense of "security" to one encompassing all manner of "threats," ranging from environmental degradation to poverty and from overpopulation to ethnic tensions. New situations are continually being classified as security issues or threats to national security in what one commentator has referred to as "an additive `laundry list' approach." The consequence is that a diverse set of new problems and goals is entering security discourse, and a whole range of social issues that were previously limited to the civilian sphere is increasingly falling under the purview of the U.S. military. That development is troubling for numerous reasons.

Since the policies resulting from this shift in thinking have lain, by and large, on the periphery of grand strategy, they have been subject to little public oversight and have been formulated very gradually. Although the shift started in the academic community in the 1970s, it was not until the 1990s that it took hold in the policy world. In 1990, then-Senator Al Gore (D-Tenn.) put environmental degradation on the national security agenda when he wrote that environmental neglect "threatens not only the quality of life, but life itself. The global environment has thus become an issue of national security." In the same year, the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program was initiated by Gore and Sen. Sam Nunn (D.-Ga.), aimed at redirecting military resources toward "developing and analyzing the data needed for alerting us to possible security threats." As Nunn put it in his speech before approval of the initiative, "I am persuaded that there is also a new and different threat to our national security emerging--the destruction of our environment. The defense establishment has a clear stake in countering this growing threat. I believe that one of our key national security objectives must be to reverse the accelerating pace of environmental destruction around the globe."

Since that time, it has become standard for Washington to cite social issues as threats to American national security. Environmental degradation is mentioned in almost all National Security Strategy documents put out by the White House since 1991. In 1996, Pres. Clinton introduced organized crime and ethnic and religious hatred to the list. By 1998, the National Security Strategy was citing rapid population growth, new infectious diseases, and uncontrolled refugee migration as issues having important implications for American security. According to Clinton, even education is now officially a "critical national security issue."

One of the major problems with redefining security so broadly is that it risks rendering the word meaningless. As Daniel Deudney, a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University, has argued, "If everything that causes a decline in human well-being is labeled a `security' threat, the term loses any analytical usefulness and becomes a loose synonym of `bad.' "When the word becomes ambiguous and diluted, any policy action may be easily justified by invoking "national security," with serious consequences for democracy, openness, and civil liberties. Two dangers are immediately apparent in the case of the environment.

First, there is a high risk that turning environmental issues into a security concern will result in the militarization of environmental policy, with detrimental effects on society and efforts to find solutions to environmental issues. Second, environmental security--policies may actually reduce security--especially if they tend to push toward conflict, rather than peaceful relations among nations.

Environmental security

Before examining those issues, it is worth asking what policymakers and government agencies mean when they talk about environmental security. Government agencies and officials rarely clarify their terms. The words security and national interest are bandied about with such frequency that it is often hard to challenge their usage and demand definitions. Nonetheless, it is possible to deduce certain linkages between environmental degradation and national security from the actions and words of the people involved. The key assumptions include the following: